Saturday, May 9, 2015

Albert George notes that the history of short
fiction has been largely ignored in France because of the lowly oral origins of
the form, an echo of the obstacles Boccaccio encountered in elevating oral
tales and anecdotes to the level of literature at the end of the middle
ages. In 1829, however, with his story
"Mateo Falcone," Prosper Merimee electrified a folk legend with the
same kind of unified effect that Poe described in his famous Twice-Told
Tales review, thus originating the formal French short story by moving
French short fiction away from the eighteenth century conte philosophique
of Voltaire. R. C. Dale has noted that,
like Poe, Merimee demanded total control over the reader's attention in his
tales. Even its implications are
withheld, says Dale, until the narrative has run its full course and the writer
has relaxed his control; only then is the reader free to contemplate the
`meaning' of the story. "Mateo
Falcone," a tale that Walter Pater once called the "cruelest story in
the world," admirably fits Poe's requirement of a sustained state of
narrative illusion.

The story opens with the reader's simulated journey,
led by the narrator, into the interior of Corsica, to the edge of an area of
dense underbrush called the maquis, in which different kinds of trees
and bushes are so entangled that one can only get through it with a
machete. It is a world in which the
ordinary laws of society do not apply.
"If you have killed a man," the people of the area say,
"Go to the maquis."
Establishing the truth of the event by casually mentioning that he saw
Mateo Falcone two years later, the narrator's description of Falcone's
legendary skill with a rifle, his sense of honor, and his cold-blooded murder
of a rival are not merely bits of legendary background, but rather the
necessary preliminaries for the story's inevitable conclusion.

The dialogue between the escaping bandit and
Falcone's only son, ironically named Fortunato, is characterized by the boy's
absolute calm and control, reminiscent of what we already know of his
father. When the adjutant arrives and
quizzes him, the boy is still in control, showing no emotion, an ironic
confirmation of the "promising qualities" that have been noted about
him. However, the character of the boy
shifts during a hypnotic scene when the adjutant dangles the watch in front of
him: "His face visibly betrayed the conflict that was going on in his mind
between covetousness and respect for the duties of sanctuary. His bare breast heaved violently, and he
seemed on the point of suffocating."

It is the
only moment of conflict in the story; because of the nature of the world in
which the characters live, once the boy makes his decision, everything follows
inevitably. When Falcone returns home
and discovers what has happened, the reader gets no indication of a conflict
inside him. The final scene when the boy
says his prayers, begs for forgiveness, and makes a last desperate attempt to
cling to his father's knees, is horrible because neither Falcone nor Merimee
give in to sentiment or comment. The
irony, of course, is that the boy must die by the hands of the father for
acting according to the bandit nature of the world in which his father
lives. What makes the story so powerful
is not simply the final horror, but rather the stark simple world Merimee
creates--a world of crime, punishment, betrayal, cunning, pride--in which moral
issues are simple and therefore terrifying.

Honore de Balzac's "La Grande Breteche"
(1832) is an important story that marks the transition from the plot
conventions of short fiction used by Boccaccio and Cervantes to the
psychological conventions characteristic of gothic obsession and romance. The
story begins with the convention of the mysterious house and the secret of its
past. The convention of having a doctor
tell the story, later used by Sheridan Le Fanu, is a means of establishing
authority and authenticity; with Poe and others the device becomes part of the
convention of the ratiocinative mystery story in which a man of science tries
to solve a basic mystery of motivation.
The mysterious house is an echo of the house built by Cervantes' jealous
Hildago, for it represents the closed-in world that the husband wishes to
create, a house of fiction, as it were, like the castle of Prospero in Poe's
"Masque of the Red Death," to keep contingency out. What makes Balzac's story of the jealous
husband different than the treatment of the theme by Boccaccio and Cervantes
story is the shift away from Boccaccio's anecdotal irony and Cervantes'
individual psychological interest.

The emphasis of the house is on its isolation,
surrounded by weeds, no path, dilapidated:
"An invisible hand has written over it all: `Mystery.'" Also
introduced early in the story is the theme of the mystery of the past as the
motivating cause of the house's condition:
"What fire from heaven can have fallen there? By what decree has salt been sown on this
dwelling? Has God been mocked here? Or was France betrayed? These are the questions we ask
ourselves. Reptiles crawl over it, but
give no reply. this empty and deserted
house is a vast enigma of which the answer is known to no one." Like the narrator in Poe's "The Fall of the
House of Usher," the teller is mystified by the effect of the house and
creates various stories to account for this "monumental embodiment of
woe."

When the notary of Vendome comes to ask the
protagonist not to walk in the gardens of the house, he thinks that he must
give up his reveries and romances about the place and hopes instead to learn
the truth "on official authority."
Although the verification of the truth based on the authority of the
teller is a common nineteenth-century story convention, the notary is not a
very good storyteller. He must back up
and fill in information he has forgotten to tell and lapses into legal
language; when mentioning the meadow where the Countess burned everything, he
digresses, asking the doctor if he has ever been there, for it is a very fine
place. Although the doctor tells the
notary that he has so vividly impressed him with his description that he
fancies he can see the Countess's glittering eyes, he says he is near to falling
asleep in spite of his interest in this "authentic story, lost in a
reverie á la Radcliffe.

The second telling of the mysterious past events
occurs when the doctor summarizes the "creepy and sinister story" to
his landlady, to which she listens in "a happy compromise between the
instinct of a police constable, the astuteness of a spy, and the cunning of a
dealer." When he queries her about
why the de Merrets parted so violently, she tells a tale of a young Spanish
grandee who disappeared one day while swimming, a story that fills him with
"vague and sinister thoughts," "romantic curiosity," and a
"religious dread not unlike the deep emotions which comes upon us when we
go into a dark church at night and discern a feeble light glimmering under a
lofty vault--the sweep of a gown or of a priest's cassock is audible--and we
shiver." The effect the doctor
describes is another example of how Balzac transforms a Boccaccio type story of
infidelity and revenge into a gothic type story in a very self-conscious
way.

Vowing he will find out the whole story, the
protagonist is determined to get it from the maid Rosalie, even being willing
to seduce her for the secret. When she
sits down to tell the third tale within the tale, Balzac reminds us that the
nature of tale-telling is indeed the story's central focus: "Now as the event of which she gave me a
confused account stands exactly midway between the notary's gossip and that of
Madame Lepas, as precisely as the middle term of a rule-of-three sum stands
between the first and third, I have only to relate it in as few words as may
be. I shall therefore be
brief." The denouement then related
is the solution to the mystery that the previous tellers have established, and,
more importantly, that the protagonist's romantic and gothic imagination has created.

In his own words rather than those of Rosalie, the
protagonist presents the basic Boccaccio intrigue. The husband, by "one of those accidents
which it is impossible to foresee" comes home late and goes into his
wife's room just in time to hear the door to a closet click shut. Accusing her of hiding someone there, he
threatens to look, but she denies it and says that if he looks and no one is
there, she will leave him forever. The
plot complications that follow focus on various reversals in which the Count
has the closet walled up, the Countess has a crack left, and the Count catches
her chipping away at the mortar and stays with her for twenty days while the
lover dies in the closet. "La
Grande Breteche" is a prototypical story of the shift from the Boccaccio
type story of intrigue, infidelity, and jealousy to the nineteenth-century
gothic type story in which jealousy becomes a projective obsession and in which
narrative modes of transmission become so important that the story becomes a
self-reflexive exploration of nature of storytelling itself.

No comments:

Tenth Anniversary of My Blog

Friday, Nov. 16, is the tenth anniversary of my blog. I have been taking some time off because I have been working on a new book on the short story. I have submitted a proposal to a publisher and am waiting for a reply. I will let you know when I hear from them. Thank you for continuing to read essays in my archives.

Now Available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle

Click cover to go to Amazon and read the Introduction and first chapter.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."